Australian first at Informatics Olympiad – have you heard?

The International Informatics Olympiad finished a couple of days ago and an Australian shared equal first place; a second member of the team was fifth, also winning a gold medal. Ishraq Huda achieved a perfect score – look at that Australian flag at the top of the rankings. There are no team results for the Informatics Olympiad.

The 2014 Informatics Olympiad was held in Taiwan. The week-long competition includes two five-hour exams, comprising tasks that test mathematical problem solving. The problems are complex and involve very large amounts of data, it is necessary to have not only programmers, “but also creative coders, who can dream up what it is that the programmers need to tell the computer to do … the hard part isn’t the programming, but the mathematics underneath it.” Achieving a gold is amazing, a perfect score astonishing.

Sadly there’s not much more to add to the story. There’s been almost no coverage of this amazing achievement – even the ABC (who covered the Mathematics Olympiad) fell short this time, the only article I can find is in The Australian. Australia’s had a nice run at the Olympiad competitions recently with a perfect score and gold in the Mathematics Olympiad last week. To be fair, though, the Informatics Olympiad website is a bit of a nightmare to navigate and so extracting useful or interesting information, as opposed to statistics, is a trial – which, by the way, pretty much sums up the difference between informatics and website design.

Congratulations to Ishraq Huda and the other Australian Informatics Olympiad competitors.